Richard Whitmire keeps saying that it is, most recently in this commentary piece in the Chronicle.

He writes, “Some people will argue that those students were never college material in the first place. True, few of those 72,000 boys [who drop out in 9th grade] each year were probably Princeton bound. And if you listen to conservative education commentators, these boys shouldn’t even be thinking about college. The country already has too many ‘degreed’ burger flippers, they argue.”

It’s not only “conservatives” who make that argument, but let’s go on.

“There are reasons to think otherwise. First, such gender imbalances trigger unhealthy (and expensive) social trends. Among African-Americans, women graduate from college at twice the rate of men, leaving few black ‘marriageable mates’ — men whose education credentials match those of black women.”

I don’t see why that’s much of a social problem — nothing requires black college-educated women to marry only black college-educated men — but more to the point, how will a policy of putting academically weak black males through college solve it? I doubt that a “degreed burger flipper” is much more desirable as a mate than a non-degreed one. And some of those college-degreed black women, like some college-degreed students of all races and both sexes, are probably doing mundane work that any high-school student could learn.

Whitmire goes on: “Also, if President Obama is right about improving the flagging U.S. position in world education rankings, the country needs to rapidly ramp up the number of college graduates.” But the president is mistaken in his apparent belief that there is a direct relationship between the level of “educational attainment” in a country and its economic health. College work (which many students do remarkably little of, as Mark Baurelein notes here) doesn’t necessarily do anything to make a student more valuable as an employee. College may add little or nothing to human capital, as I argued here.

I agree with Whitmire when he says we must “shake up teachers’ colleges.” That’s a necessary first step in improving our woeful K-12 system. Poor teaching is just one of many reasons why K-12 education is so ineffective.